


Dragon Fire

by Lasgalendil



Category: The Hobbit (Jackson Movies), The Hobbit - All Media Types, The Hobbit - J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings (Movies), The Lord of the Rings - All Media Types, The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Battle of Five Armies, Caring Thranduil, Gen, Manipulative Thranduil, No Grave No Memory, Thranduil Not Being An Asshole
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-18
Updated: 2014-12-18
Packaged: 2018-03-02 02:30:04
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 482
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2796380
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lasgalendil/pseuds/Lasgalendil
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"There is no grave, no memory."</p><p>Legolas thinks his father choses not to speak of his mother's death because he does not care…but what if this is the price the Elvenking must pay for the life of his son? Love is a deep, dark magic, and some secrets cannot be spoken.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dragon Fire

“Naneth! Naneth!”

I have forgotten my mother. There are dreams I cannot remember, one face I cannot place. Of my infancy there is nothing, not her words, her smile, the sound of her singing, the scent of her skin or sweet milk as she nursed. Of my mother I remember only pain, white-hot, searing pain, a far-off shore through a grey rain curtain of silver glass, shimmering in the sunlight…

Then a voice. It sounds like my father’s voice, but it cannot be. My father is stately and strong, a King of Elves and commander of armies. This broken voice, this begging, this pleading—these screams—cannot belong to him.

Then the pain is gone. The darkness and horror of stony steppes and deep places has disappeared. I awake. I am healed and whole. Here there are trees and sunlight and starlit sky.

But sometimes, only sometimes, I remember as though in whispers the words we once shared:

I want to go home. I want Naneth.  
This is our home now, my father tells me. Here you are safe.  
I want Naneth. Where is Naneth.  
He will not answer.  
And what, Ada, I ask, has happened to your face?  
Nothing, my son, he tells me. Nothing has happened to my face.

And nothing has. His face is unchanged…and yet, and yet I remember in reverie the scars and scalded bone unhealing, and all the horror I felt…

His face is whole. My mother is gone. I am alone. And if he loves me any less, I tell myself, it is because he loved her, his heart is broken, and it will not heal.

But sometimes I wake to the feel of hot iron—oh, the fury of dragon’s breath!—against my flesh and I cry out for her anew.

“Sleep, child,” my father tells me with the tenderness he cannot find while I am waking. “It was a dream, nothing more.”

Where is Naneth, I dare not ask him. Where is Naneth.

And somehow I know she did not abandon me for the West as he is wont to claim. Somehow I know the scars that he bears beneath this façade of carelessness run through his bones and will not be healed. And somehow I know the dragonfire that caused them seared not his flesh, but mine.

My father is the Elvenking. There are magics in this world against which he has not been tested, and some against which even he cannot stand. The dead he cannot raise. Deep magics he cannot erase. This I know. And yet I am told the wounds of dragon-fire cannot be undone, but they can be borne.

...so he bears them. She has died, yet we live, and these many long years he has borne them for me.

If it seems my father loves me less, it is because he would not have me see.


End file.
